cover image: WORKING PAPER - 22-4 Socioeconomic Diversity of Economics PhDs

20.500.12592/hjdxp1

WORKING PAPER - 22-4 Socioeconomic Diversity of Economics PhDs

12 Apr 2022

Figure 1, panel A, shows that, compared with the 14 large PhD fields, economics has the lowest share of PhD recipients with no parent with a BA or higher, and the second-highest share of PhD recipients with a parent with a graduate degree (after the humanities). [...] We proxy for the parental education of the similar-aged US population with the educational attainment of the US population aged 50–74 as of 2019.17 We show the results of these comparisons in figure 2: we compare the share of economics PhD recipients with no parent with a BA or higher (13.7 percent) to the average among PhD fields (26.4 percent), the average among US-born math and social science B. [...] We also compare the share of US-born economics PhD recipients with a parent with a graduate degree (65 percent) to the average among PhD fields (49.9 percent), the average among US-born math and social science BA recipients (38.7 percent), the average among US-born BA recipients of any major (29 percent), and the average among the similar-aged US population (13.4 percent). [...] However, by the 2010s economics was the lowest-ranked in terms of the share with no parent with a BA and among the top in terms of the share with a parent with a graduate degree. [...] 26 We estimate the shares of the overall population very roughly: for example, we estimate that the share of the similar-aged US population made up of men with parents with less than a BA is half of the share of the total US population aged 50–74 who had no BA in 2019 (and similarly for the other education categories and gender, or education category and race/ethnicity).
Pages
73
Published in
United States of America